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CRAZY POLITICS (AND HAVING A VOICE IN THEM)

A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
November 9, 2003

This week I read part of Molly Ivins’ and Lou Dubose’s new book called Bushwhacked: Life In George W. Bush’s America. I bought it because I thought it would have some humorous stories I could use for this sermon, but that’s not what I found. Molly Ivins wasn’t writing funny things at all. She was writing scary things -- really scary things! Fortunately, I could still use them for the sermon. We just won’t be laughing as much as feeling sick to our stomachs.

Politics seems to have become a laughingstock of the American People, maybe of the world. California’s recent Recall is an example. I don’t even know how many people ran for Governor - 130 or so? - which, in itself, is a statement of how ludicrous and idiotic the Hollywood state has made its political process. And in the end, they elect a Hollywood governor to rule them: the “Governator,” as he was dubbed in the newspapers.

Now, before I go any further, I have a confession to make. I actually like Schwarzeneggar movies. I especially liked his sci-fi movie called Total Recall, which had nothing to do with the California recall but was about Mars and mental recall. My other favorite Schwarzeneggar movie is True Lies, a spy/tough guy spoof about the lies the spy tells his wife and vice versa. This movie also might help Arnold be a good Governor, since much of politics seems to require some ability to tell true lies.

The two things Arnold has going for him, as I see it, are his sense of humor, as evidenced in his spate of movies making fun of his other movies, and his ties to the Kennedys through his wife, Maria Shriver, not that “family” has ever meant an agreement on politics for any of us. “Congregation” doesn’t mean political agreement either, in case some of you were unaware that we do have members of the different political parties among us and it is a good idea not to make the mistake of thinking we all think alike.

So, I must stop here for a moment and remind you that we have a tradition of “freedom of the pulpit,” and my comments are my opinions shared, not necessarily the opinions of all of you. In the good tradition of our political system, you would need to poll everyone as they leave if you want to get a good measure of what people really think.

I don’t have as much of a problem with Governor Schwarzeneggar as I do with 130 people running for the job. After all, Schwarzeneggar has had ample years of Thanksgiving dinners with the extended Kennedy family to pick up the delicate nuances, not to mention the secrets, of American politics. What those 130 people running for the job have done, though, is take a respectable and very important, incredibly important office and turn it into a game, like buying a ticket for the lottery. On the other hand, maybe the people were just exercising their right to run for office in spite of big business’s control of the political arena, even though fame and money won in the end anyway.

That was one of the most frightening things Molly Ivins said, at least in the first part of her book, which is all I read. Big businesses, otherwise known as Corporations, control politics today. She writes,

What has changed in this country over the course of the past twenty-some years is that government has served less and less as a brake on corporate behavior and more and more as a corporate auxiliary, because of the corrupting effects of the system of legalized bribery we call ‘campaign financing.’ (p. 16)

Yeah, yeah. We all know about campaign financing. We’ve heard it, but, really, what can we do about it? Everything has gotten so out of hand that we’re all jaded, and, frankly depressed, some to the extent that leaving the country actually sounds like a viable alternative. It would sure make Canada a great place to live if enough people engaged in exodus rather than taking the “stand and fight” route. If we’re really going to clean up our politics, we are all going to have to get our hands dirty. We’re going to have to take a stand, and we’re going to have to fight. Maybe that’s what those 130 people who ran for governor were really saying: exercise your right to run and to change the world.

Nah! I bet most of them were just foolin’ around.

How does anyone know what to believe anymore? Or who to believe?

Here’s a bit of 4000 year-old wisdom: The Code of Hammurabi, the world’s oldest legal code, says, “The first duty of government is to protect the powerless against the powerful.”

So, what do we do when government is in dereliction of duty? Want some examples of dereliction? Molly Ivins summarizes some of them:

After more than two years of George W. Bush’s administration,…we have seen a serious degradation of civil liberties matched by an equally remarkable increase in property rights. (p. xii-xiii)

The free-market fundamentalists…are…blind to a country where the government is redistributing resources from the poor and middle class to the rich. This is open class warfare. This country is not working for most of the people in it. The health-care system is falling apart, the social safety net has been shredded, the Bushies want to privatize Social Security and the schools. These are the same ideological geniuses who brought you the savings-and-loan scandals, $2 trillion in deficits, the California electricity crisis, Enron, WorldCom--in fact, it’s the same loser laissez-faire ideology that produced the Great Depression. The free market is a wonderful thing--but it functions well only within a nest of law and regulation. When those who are regulated by the government buy the government, the people get screwed. (p. 46-47)

That’s “buy” with a “b-u-y.” “When those who are regulated by the government buy the government, the people get screwed.” Most of Ivins’ book appears to be stories about people getting screwed.

Here’s a book about people getting screwed who learned to fight back. It’s called, Going Public, by Michael Gecan. Cathleen Becskehazy left it on my desk, and the words “extraordinary politics” on the cover caught my eye, so I thought, maybe this will have some insights for this sermon, and sure enough, Gecan has definite ideas for how to get our hands dirty standing up for our rights.

Gecan worked for the Industrial Areas Foundation as an organizer for over twenty-five years in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. His clients were congregations and other community groups who wanted to find ways to revive their decaying communities. He writes about types of power, and that “you couldn’t just ‘reform’ the abusers of power,…you had to battle them…to check them.” He lists three things, organizing, participating and acting, as being essential to the health of our institutions, our congregations and our political parties.

The groups he worked with he called the third sector; not the private sector nor the public sector, but the sector of voluntary organizations whose product is the growth and development of people and their institutions. There is immense power in these groups, power being defined as “the ability to act.” Here, in this room, is immense power to change the world through the decision to act. Gecan’s focus was on teaching people “how to argue, act, negotiate, and compromise.”

His book, too, like Ivans’, was filled with stories of people confronting politicians and having to fight, and fight hard, to get every tiny concession. One of the problems, as Gecan says, is that “the culture of contempt for active citizenry is nearly universal--taught, learned, practiced, and perfected by everyone in the legislative establishment from the governor to the newest receptionist.” (p. 43) If you can’t learn to argue and to fight, you won’t gain much in the political arena.

I think this is why so many people like (and hate) Michael Moore, the creator of Bowling for Columbine. He is the epitome of an example of an active citizen, going out and not only confronting, but documenting for all of us, the abuses of power on the part of those in power, pointing out “true lies” or how saying things in certain ways can be true but totally misleading in context. He forces his way past the culture of contempt to engage real people by disentangling them from their corporate strings.

It’s not a pretty sight, this confrontation of those in power, which is why his movies can compete with those of Arnold Schwarzeneggar. We love to see strong people win, whether it’s with brawn or with brain. The camera really can beat out the fist.

Unfortunately, Michael Moore didn’t win the California election, not that he ran. His work is as a citizen, not a denizen, of power. He will not play the game even when receiving his Academy Award. The international media is a tool for educating the world, and Moore was not going to let that opportunity to say even one thing get away from him. Our growing global community is one more example of active citizenry speaking out, sharing information and creating change on an incredible scale.

Some of you get emails from organizations like Act for Change or MoveOn.org. When Bush started the war in Iraq, citizens started a global action through the internet to protest the war and point out the true lies and the downright lies that have been foisted on not only the American people but the world community. MoveOn’s readership sprouted phenomenally, and the vigils of light in which we participated were just one of their ideas. A couple weeks ago, they sent out an email requesting donations to run ads to inform people about “the dangers and damages of President Bush’s policies.” The email I received dated October 24 said,

If there was a world record for the most political money raised online in the shortest amount of time, we could well have beaten it yesterday. We’ve never seen anything quite like it: in only 28 hours, you put up the first $1.1 million in our $10 million campaign to get out the truth about President Bush’s policies. 19,433 donors chipped in together to make this happen.

Each email is signed “Carrie, Eli, Joan, Noah, Peter, Wes, and Zack, The MoveOn.org Team.” Just a handful of ordinary citizens willing to act for change, and inviting us all to join them in putting our voices together in one giant protest against injustice. It seems to be working. Who knows?

Politics are crazy today. Maybe they have always been crazy. But exciting things are happening as well, and I see that in the efforts of just masses of ordinary citizens speaking out. I mean, an internet political action group that spans the world! Wow! It is incredible! Such positive evidence of human caring is enough inspiration to face the injustices head-on. Let’s not hear any more about moving to Canada! Let’s pick up our breetches or our skirts and get down there in the mud and start flinging some around ourselves, exercising our political voices in spite of corporate and legislative contempt. Let’s be a little crazy, too, and maybe make a difference for somebody who needs our help. In the face of our government’s dereliction of duty, let’s do all we can to protect the powerless against the powerful.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson